Christian Morality
Derivation of Principles
Copyright © 2004 by Gary Novak

Chaptrer 1.
Morality is that which sustains life.

Christ said, "If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments" (Mat 19:17). Notice that life is a state of existence which you can move into or out of. Overcoming sin is how life is acquired. He also said, "Let me firmly assure you, he who believes has eternal life" (John 6:47). Life is a mind-frame which is dependent upon believing.

The corollary is of course that sin creates death. Christ said the devil "brought death to man from the beginning" (John 8:44).

To understand how morality creates life requires an understanding of what life is. Biological life provides a good example of some of the basic characteristics of life. Notice that biological life is base on laws. John the Elder said, "Sin is lawlessness" (1John 3:4). Laws result from complexities created in stabilized realities such as matter. Laws are the consistent relationships. Break the laws, and the complexities end at that point. Some might say that complexity increases at that point. But the concern here is ordered complexities. Ordered complexities depend upon consistent relationships being maintained.

Therefore, life could be defined as ordered complexity, and death as disordered complexity. This definition applies to spiritual life as well as material life.

There is another mind-frame which denies spiritual existence. Before getting to a description of spiritual realities, there are a few words that can be said about the materialistic denial. In ancient history, there was no concept of the characteristics of matter; but nowdays, it has been thoroughly studied. Matter does not think. The molecules in the brain have been analyzed down to parts per trillion, and all have been found to have functions unrelated to thought. The most complex process in existence could not be performed by molecules which escape detection by modern science.

The reason why believers assume there is a spirit world is because the most reliable and wise persons they encounter are the ones who come from the spirit world and describe what is over there. Even the not-so-wise sometimes make excursions to the other side as "near death experiences" or similar phenomena, and they always have the same basic description of what's over there.

At a basic level, the spirit world and material world are made up of realities. The concept of reality needs to be defined properly and understood to develop moral truth at the level of rationality that is expected of modern knowledge.

The definition of reality has some demanding requirements to meet, because the concept applies to some highly diverse states of existence. Reality includes that which makes up thoughts, that which can be perceived and that which can be communicated. To determine what all of these concepts have in common, it is necessary to start with an analysis of what existence is.

Existence is made of substance and configurations. One cannot exist without the other. To determine this, substance is evaluated without configurations. An example would be all air and nothing else. It has to have particles, which are configurations, before it can exist. So substance cannot exist without configurations.

Then consider configurations without substance. For this, consider a painting and then remove the substance, which is paint. The configurations disappear with the substance. So configurations cannot exist without substance.

Reality can then be tested to determine its relationship to substance and configurations. Clay models can be visualized. Two objects can be made of clay, such as a car and a tree. The substances are the same (clay) but the realities are different. So the realities are not determined by the substance.

Next, the configurations are compared. The car has the configuration of a car, which makes it a car; and the tree has the configuration of a tree, which makes it a tree.

Therefore, reality is the configuration of any substance. But does this definition meet the demanding requirements of reality? Are configurations perceivable? Yes. Are configurations communicable? yes. Are there configurations in thoughts? Yes. Thoughts are acquired through perception and stored as memories. They are then modified by imagination or whatever. The key question is, does perception create configurations of a substance. One must be aware of the configurations to use the realities. A box must represent the configurations of a box. But is being aware of configurations having configurations? There is no significant difference. The reality is in the configurations either way.

The manner in which reality is acquired by perception is by the awareness substance of the spirit contacting configurations and making copies of them in a template manner. The evidence is that everything must have configurations, and therefore, thoughts must acquire configurations by contact of external realities in a template manner.

There are many terms related to reality which need to be clarified, such as subjective, objective, abstract and basic.

Objective reality originates outside a person's mind. Subjective reality originates inside a person's mind. Abstract reality is nonperceivable reality, usually due to the complexity of the relationships. Basic realities are those upon which other realities depend. Since other realities depend upon them, they function as laws which influence realities. They are more important because of their greater influence.

This gets to significance, which is about the same as importance. Significance could be defined as the relationships to surrounding realities, the more basic ones being more important.

One of the most critical parts of judgment is determining significance. Discoveries have more to do with getting significances corrected than perceiving something that has not been perceived before. Of course, the opposite of correct significance is straining out gnats and swallowing camels (Mat 23:4).

The accumulation of all significant realities is unified reality. It's everything. When realities have relationships between them, they get connected into a unit. There can only be one unit of any size for interrelated realities, because there is not more than one alternative for most realities or relationships. For example, one and one can only equal two and nothing else.

Therefore, there is only one truth. Everyone has a somewhat different version of what it might be, but the source is invariable.

What then is truth? It is the communicated representation of unified reality. Now why didn't Christ tell Pilot something that simple (John 18:38)? Because Pilot would not have known what it meant or what to do with the information if he understood it. He would have scoffed.

This analysis explains why truth sets people free (John 8:32). It connects them to unified reality. But to really understand the significance, the characteristics of unified reality must be studied in more detail. One of its important characteristics is that it is objective. This means it has origins outside of minds.

The material universe is a molecular representation of unified reality, which is of course why it is called a universe. It means one verse. So the characteristics of unified reality can be determined by studying the molecular universe. But in actuality, unified reality exists in minds even when not in the material universe. How can this be? Because spiritual beings are made up of realities, which can be unified, even if there is no molecular existence.

A very important point to consider is that only unified reality allows a high degree of ordered complexity to exist. Knowing that fact is life; not knowing it is death. In other words, this point is the basis of morality.

Let's compare two types of complexity: ordered complexity and disordered complexity. Life is ordered complexity; and death is disordered complexity. But unified reality is a better definition of life than ordered complexity is. Unified reality is the complete and total order of complex realities, while no order can exist without it. So why define life in terms of a small fragment of something which can never exist in itself.

This definition of life includes spiritual beings and the environments which they depend upon. In the biological sciences, life is generally defined in terms of molecular forms apart from their environments; but since the environments are essential to it, the concept is too narrow for philosophical purposes.

We now have a basis for defining morality. Morality as that which sustains life. Sin, of course, is that which destroys life. Christ described morality in this manner. What then sustains life? More than anything, it is a proper relationship to unified reality. Morality is more commonly described in terms of the interactions of persons, which is certainly where the significance is; but the results cannot be adequately achieved without including all of unified reality in the equation.

To look at the equation properly, another concept must be added. It is understanding. Understanding is unified reality in the mind. A person must have a representation of unified reality in the mind before he can relate significantly to unified reality outside the mind. Getting one's mind together is getting it unified. This subject relates to all elements of intelligence and the proper handling of reality.

Christ's purpose was to increase understanding of morality, and he referred to understanding often (Mat 15:10)(Mark 8:21)(Luke 24:45)(John 8:43).

God and morality are defined by objective reality. Without objective reality, the difference between God and satan cannot be determined. There is a tendency in religion to subjectivize God and morality. Persons who subjectivize in that manner do not know the difference between God and satan, and they assume that a lot of satan's work is God's work.

Subjectivizing religion results from a Biblical interpretation apart from the rest of life. Without the objective realities of life, rationalizers find whatever they want to find in the Bible, and the result is a promotion of corruption rather then an improved standard.

Hypothetically, defining morality as obedience to God would not change what morality is, because God would not put morality in conflict with objective reality. Regardless, people have to use a reasoning process to determine what morality is. Therefore, the only significance in defining morality as obedience to God is that the persons who do so use their evaluation as a pretext for contradicting reason on the subject, as if reason must be avoided in determining obedience to God (See Veritatis Splendor, Chapter 6).

An area which requires much focus of attention is rationality. It is where human responsibilities lie. Humans are supposed to be overcoming sin through rationality. Reason is making relationships between realities. Logic is the strictest application of reason. When relationships are made between realities, the realities must be unified. Significant relationships cannot be made between false realities (those which conflict with unified reality).

The process of making relationships between realities causes unified reality to increase and false realities to decrease. No other outcome can occur, because only unified reality has complex relationships within it. Reason thereby unifies realities.

This process is not limited to philosophy. Whenever realities interact, the same thing occurs. It is automatic, and no one can prevent it. The reason why it is automatic is because consistent relationships are strengthened, and inconsistent relationships are weakened, whenever realities interact. Strengthening the consistent relationships unifies the realities, at least partially. So all interactions of realities do the same thing as rationality does—they increase truth or unified reality—but not necessarily as precisely as controlled rationality might.

Do you suppose God knows this? One of the first stories in Genesis says that because of man's arrogance in building the tower of Babel, God dispersed man into many languages and groups. Of course, the timing did not quite coincide with the literal events, but it was a moral allegory. It says that diversity copes with sin. It does so by creating an interaction of realities. Where reason leaves off, diversity does something similar. Genesis was written by a prophet a couple of centuries BC, who also knew this philosophical point.

Notice that the subject here consists of the requirements for life. There are certain standards, states and processes that have to occur to create or sustain life. Christ taught this subject as morality. It is more abstract than the subject of biology, where people learn the requirements for sustaining material life. It is exactly for this reason that material life was created—to learn from highly perceivable realities the lessons for sustaining life.